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Outstanding Instrumental Album

2000 Canadian Prairie Music Awards

The album features 7 original compositions by Bob Evans, along with his arrangements of tunes by Lennon and McCartney, Ray Bell and Joel Fafard, and his cover of two fingerstyle guitar classics: Leo Kottke’s Bean Time and Tom Rush’s Rockport Sunday.
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Transcription available

The Noodle Kitchen is an original composition that grew out of … well … some noodling on the guitar. I was playing around with a combination of a steady 8th note bass line – perhaps while goofing around with Every Breath You Take – and playing some sliding 5ths over top of it. It eventually evolved into this piece.

Transcription available

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Yikes! We’re already half way through December. I figure I better get this out before I slide right through the holiday season into the new year.

Lyrically, Santa Claus is Coming to Town has to be one of the creepiest tunes in the Christmas song catalogue.
Sung to a beguilingly cheerful tune, the lyrics are an Orwellian view of Christmas, where Santa is a punitive Big Brother. He monitors everything you do and judges you accordingly. He knows all about you: when you’re happy, sad, good, bad, awake, asleep … everything! He is watching YOU.

Phew! Listen to this song a couple of times and it won’t be the anticipation of presents on Christmas morning that makes it difficult for you to get to sleep at night.

Fortunately, this is an instrumental version of the song. You don’t have to be worried about a seasonally induced dose of paranoia while listening to this arrangment.

Transcription available

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If ever there was a Christmas carol that should be played on the guitar, it would be Silent Night.
After all, according to numerous recountings of the songs humble origin, it was first performed
at the Midnight Mass on Christmas Eve, 1818, with the musical accompaniment coming not from the church’s organ,
per standard operating procedure, but from Fr. Mohr’s guitar. In the almost 200 years since its creation, it has become a central piece in the Christmas canon.

Stories abound about the reason the organ wasn’t functioning: mice had chewed the bellows, the
organ had broken down and there was no organ technician who lived close by to repair it, and so on. But the role of the guitar
in its composition and first performance remains consistent.

Gruber’s original autographed manuscript of the song with guitar accompaniment appears to the right.

This is my humble arrangement of the tune. You’ll find it is a relatively straightforward arrangement, although it does shift positions up and down the neck.